Animals and Psychology
1965 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Lipsett
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Laboratory rats help behavioural scientists gather objective data on complex behaviour. Comparative psychology grows from Darwinian foundations.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lipsett's collage of behavioural footage and philosophical voiceover could've been a snoozefest about lab rats, but instead he's doing something genuinely weird—treating animal observation as a Brechtian mirror for human rationality itself, which is exactly the kind of subversion everyone else sleeps on.
A formally rigorous essay-film that inherits the avant-garde documentary tradition while sitting comfortably in the lineage of Grierson and the National Film Board's commitment to philosophical inquiry; Lipsett's montage discipline and the measured pacing of revelation mark this as a work deeply aware of its own craft and argument.
The genius move is Lipsett's choice to let the *sound*—the precise, clinical narration paired against ambient lab noise—do the philosophical work while the image stays observational and unstaged; it's a technical economy that transforms what could be rote science communication into something genuinely unsettling.